Friday, August 24, 2018

A Queer Utopia: Supple and Turbulent, Chapter Four


4



Something utterly bland droned from the speaker on the windowsill just inside the screen. Jake’s an amateur harpsichord builder. He looked back down the stairs at me and made the international sign of the gag reflex. Not our choice of music, I told myself. I’ll enjoy it because it gives Luke pleasure, and I love Luke.

 

The screen door’s peeling white frame greeted us with a rusty creak. Thank God there were still places like this off the beaten track, I thought, untouched by the synthetic cuteness of every beautiful spot the urban professionals discover as a getaway and then overrun with Audis and designer boutiques.

 
Inside, Luke was standing on his head naked against the wall, a kaftan of deep blue homespun Indian cotton rolled up beside him, a small uncut amethyst mounted in silver wire on a chain carefully piled on top. His arms looked too slight to offer the support the pose needed. But then he’d amazed me time and again with the asanas he could effortlessly assume. You’d never know to see him practice that he’d taken up yoga to keep himself mobile in the face of joint problems that made even Billy’s look like small change. The grace with which he walked in his skin gave his slight frame a phenomenal sexiness. His build dramatically accentuated an asset he was sensitive enough about that the rest of us were careful to lust over it in silence, knowing how anxious he could be that men might only be interested in what he had hanging between his legs. His cock dangled as far as his navel toward his wispy goatee and the page-boy haircut that fell, a little ridiculous in its inversion, from the crown of his head. His face showed no trace that he’d registered our arrival, his eyes still closed, his exhalations even through parted lips. He’d come back to us when he was ready.

 

Hank strode in from the kitchen, telegraphed a quick glance at Luke, then whispered to us in his thickest and most accomplished Phyllis Diller, “Welcome to the cave, girls. Batboy will rejoin us momentarily. If he doesn’t topple over from the weight of that tubesteak and break something.”

 

Kurt snorted, clamped a hand over Hank’s mouth and blew a raspberry into his neck. Hank was wearing a pea-green miniskirt, orange pumps and matching disc earrings.  “Fashion error,” Kurt said. “That skirt cries out for Pepto-Bismol pink.”

 

“Everyone’s a critic,” Hank vamped, “but no one’s willing to design.”

 
You wouldn't peg him for the biggest top of us all, the larger-than-life Italian New Yorker who'd coaxed countless legs on the Upper West Side into the air--when he wasn’t dancing to Nine Inch Nails in the kitchen where he earned his living catering the parties of all the men he’d slept with. Which was to say a good chunk of queer Manhattan above Columbus Circle. What he’d done to Jake’s butt the last time we’d set up the massage table didn’t exactly defy description. But it had stretched more than our imaginations and left Jake babbling happy obscenities as he arched up to clutch Rajiv’s shoulders at the head of the table.

 

“Danny Deever and his Brahmin prince will be down from the loft any day now, as soon as they finish checking each other for ticks. For the eighth time. You can never be too careful in these parts,” Hank camped on.

 
The room smelled of cedar that had seasoned through fifty humid summers and fifty snowy winters in the Smokies. The awning windows, hinged at the tops of their long, narrow frames, all angled out as Jake had propped them when we first arrived. A breeze blew through on its way from the Mississippi toward North Carolina. In the middle of the living room a  hand-braided rug spiralled in a starburst of now-faded colours salvaged from wool clothes someone’s grandparents had worn. Behind the living-room walls ran the passage that gave onto the kitchen and three bedrooms. In the corner a narrow staircase, bookshelves built into its underside, mounted to a railed gallery that overlooked the communal space. A single long, low upper room opened directly onto it, brightened by light that streamed through the windows, filtered by trees that lined the cobbled walk down from the drive above the house. A tangle of sheets twisted and rose above a bed in the back corner, from which Jim and Rajiv extricated themselves like two monarch butterflies sharing a single chrysalis. When they came forward to the gallery, their erections  poked out at us from under the rail. Jim’s blond hair fell lank to his shoulders. He hadn’t cut it since he’d left me. I found myself wondering what it would feel like brushing the inside of Rajiv’s thighs.

 I looked away, wanting to focus on anything but the sight of the two of them together. Luke came out of his headstand, curling down into a crouch with his back to us, then rising to unfold his kaftan and drop it over his head. Draped in its heavily textured folds, he turned around, came forward, took my hand in one of his and laid his other over my heart. His eyes lit up in surprise as he touched me. “You’re refrigerated,” he said.

 “And ready to go back in if you’re coming too,” I said.

 “After lunch, you’ve got a date,” he said. He looked around the room and took in a deep breath. “It’s so easy to see why Pete chose this place. It’s got his energy in every corner.”

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